Copa 71: The Lost Lionesses review – the wild tale of the Women’s World Cup that Fifa tried to stop

Ask someone when the first Women’s World Cup was held and you may get several answers. Was it the unofficial Coppa del Mondo in 1970, in Italy, or the 1991 contest in China, which Fifa would only call the “World Championship”, or was it the 1995 World Cup, in Sweden, when the quotation marks were finally shaken off?

The fantastically fun Storyville film Copa 71: The Lost Lionesses – which had a theatrical release in March – has an alternative suggestion. It makes a strong case for another unofficial World Cup, which took place in 1971, in Mexico, just after various countries’ bans on women’s football had been lifted. Here, women’s teams competed on the world stage in televised matches. It attracted huge crowds and dared to suggest – cruelly, prematurely – that, after decades underground, women’s football had finally arrived.

This vivid documentary tells the story of that tournament, which Fifa refused to recognise as a World Cup and tried to suppress, banning Mexican clubs from allowing matches to be played at their grounds. This meant that matches had to be moved to the biggest stadiums in the country, which were controlled not by clubs, but by media groups. Compelled to fill tens of thousands more seats, these companies used every resource at their disposal to try to do so, getting the teams in newspapers, magazines and on television. It worked: there were 110,000 people at the final. The material gathered here is astounding.

The tournament is a narrative gift. It allows the story to play out like a traditional sport documentary – as the games progress, with the players who took part looking back on their involvement. It is thrilling, even now; although there isn’t footage of every breathtaking twist and turn, there is enough to get the gist. More than 50 years later, there is still talk of biased refereeing, of decisions that could have changed the game, of being underprepared, of having an inferiority complex. (“Speak for yourself, I didn’t have an inferiority complex,” says one of the Mexican players in response to a former teammate.) I had no idea who won, so I was watching as if the matches were happening live.

Within and away from the football, the drama is spectacular. A player breaks a foot and has to be carried off the pitch by her teammates. Another match is stopped 10 minutes before full-time because of the chaos caused by a series of questionable decisions by the referee, including an astonishing disallowed goal. I did not expect the words “then came the kicks and punches” to appear in this documentary.

Nor did I expect it to turn into a labour dispute, when one of the teams refuses to play after learning that they are not being paid, despite the organisers raking it in from ticket sales and sponsorship deals. It is hard not to think of the US national team settling their long‑running pay dispute with their governing body in 2022.

There is much more to it than sport, as there always is. The early 70s was a time of social upheaval in which second-wave feminism and the women’s movement were breaking into the mainstream. Not that you would know it from most of the archive footage here, which gives a sense of what female footballers had to put up with.

The players are seen as jokes. They are given the Carry On treatment, with plenty of references to their legs and the shortness of their shorts. A Mexican official tells the New York Times that the players are “not muscular monstrosities, but generally pretty girls”. An English news report shows a journalist asking one woman: “What’s a nice girl like you doing playing football?” In France, a journalist sets up a women’s football team in jest; we see a man on television arguing that women playing football is “a curiosity, both erotic and comedic”.

But there is a sense that, during the tournament, a different spirit emerged. These players, so used to being ignored or mocked, became stars. The tragedy is that it was so short-lived. Rattled by the success of the competition, Fifa cracked down harder. The England players, having at last been taken seriously, returned home to no fanfare whatsoever. Several players talk here about how it crushed them – how they were unable to speak about their enormous achievements, even to their teammates, for another 50 years.

This documentary does their story justice, albeit belatedly, and it does so in style. It is a rollicking underdog tale. As one of the Italian players puts it, “it was a wild adventure”.